The Presidential Years 285
Stane Kavčič, who set up a dialogue with the strikers and yielded to their
demands: the price of coal was increased and subsequently their pay was im-
proved. Kavčič later wrote that the Slovenian ideologues received a lesson “that
was not without positive influence, and the further development of policy.”^112
Although Tito branded the strike as the fruit of “imperialist forces” and “hostile
elements,” it is telling that the CC LCY, in a secret session on 6 February 1958,
got to the core of the problem, the relationship between the center and the
periphery, asking how to regulate the connection between party and society.
Whereas Tito required “administrative [i.e., punitive] measures,” the Slove-
nians wanted liberal political tactics, as outlined by the Sixth Congress, that
asked the LCY not to rule with an iron fist but to guide and to show the right
direction by soft, democratic means. As Kardelj observed, after 1952 a “slow-
down began, the bureaucratic tendencies were strengthened (again) on all lev-
els, while the party lost its ideological function.” Because of these conflicting
opinions, a quarrel flared up within the Yugoslav leadership for the first time.
It did not have immediate traumatic consequences, but foreshadowed further
disagreements that were doomed to last until Tito’s death and beyond, until the
collapse of Yugoslavia.^113 Kardelj did not speak without reason, conscious that
Djilas’s defeat in 1954 had been his defeat as well and that after Djilas’s dis-
appearance, the LCY had undergone a moral and psychological regression,
rediscovering the need for the “discipline” Tito held so dear. In that period, the
following warning could be heard at a party session: “From now on, comrades,
we have to be alert and keep our eyes open, even when we read the writings of
Comrade Kardelj.”^114 Like Djilas, for many he too stank of heresy.
On 17 February 1958, the CC LCY sent a letter to all party members that
summarized its discussions and confronted the political crises of the system.
With arguments not dissimilar to those made by Djilas, it condemned the cor-
ruption of the League’s functionaries, embroiled as they were in bureaucracy
and privileges, and recognized for the first time the presence of nationalist,
even chauvinist tendencies in Yugoslavia. However, it hushed up the principal
problem, that of the relations between the republics and the federal center.^115
The letter reverberated among the members. “It is the most revolutionary
document of this type since the party came to power,” commented Dobrica
Ćosić, adding prudently that “the letter will stay an anemic bit of propaganda
if it is not followed by laws, administrative measures, state control, but above all
by a free and unreserved critique by the press and public opinion. The stick will
again hit only the average man.”^116
The Seventh Congress of the CPYBeginning in February 1957, the Yugoslav politicians began preparing a new
party program, after the old one had been abolished at the Sixth Congress in